“Oh! those ‘Wohelo’ heart-shaped buttons!” Sally’s eyes and the July sky-beams together picked out the decorative W—she was sure it meant to be a W—within the blue heart of glass. “And that white blouse with the blue facings—it just brings out the color of your eyes, ‘Glory,’” calling Jessica, the oldest of the quintette, by the name which, growing out of an incident, had clung to her in childhood, to blossom later into her Camp Fire title.
“Cousin Anne gave it to me on my birthday and my lavender smock frock, too; I made the lavender Tam myself.” The Morning-Glory was utterly smiling again, forgetting even the brass buttons on the coat of her great-grandfather, the only relative besides Cousin Anne who seemed to her, in a way, to live and preside over her girlhood, forgetting them and him in that jolliest of youth’s experiences, to be abroad with a small band of admiring individuals of its own age and sex.
Looking back, mentally, she saw that seventeenth birthday, separated from her only by a hand-span of fourteen days, standing in the way and smiling at her, not yet hidden by any curve in the highroad of life nor blotted out by any startling event.
Looking forward, literally, she saw a different vision in ugly contrast to delicate smock and Wohelo blouse: a vision that at a distance suggested nothing so strongly as a bedizened magpie.
“Who’s that swinging on the garden gate?” burst forth Betty.
“Oh! it’s that girl with the funny surname—‘Tingle,’ isn’t it—who entered high school last January.” The pretty shell-pink tints of Arline’s complexion—her strong point—deepened with disfavor as she looked ahead at the restless gate, one of a scattered row decorating one side of a raw new street whose lately erected dwellings faced depressingly upon vacant lots, piles of sand and earth, a wheelbarrow or two, and the gaping bones of skeleton houses.
“Yes, and if ever there was a surname invented that rang true to life, it’s that one—so far as she’s concerned!” Sally, throwing up her eyes, rose to a dramatic outburst. “Penelope Tingle! Just think of it! And she gives you the ‘tingles’ all over when you come within a yard of her. The ‘Black and White Warbler’ some of the high school boys who are interested in bird-study call her, because her voice is so high an’ thin an’ wiry and her laugh like a hiss.”
“Her clothes would set me tingling worse than her voice; they talk to you before ever you get near her!” Olive’s nostrils quivered.
“Hush! we’re almost upon her—and the white gate,” came from Jessica.
“Hul-lo-a! Hullo! Sal-ly.” The voice which rang out from that swinging gate as the quintette of girls ranged abreast of it had at this moment more of the stinging quality of a blue jay’s when it wakes one at sunrise than of any species of warbler; the Tingle girl’s clothing must partly have inspired the boys’ nickname: black and white of the loudest upright stripes upon the swinging skirt, black and white in brindled circles on the too visible expanse of stockings, enlivened by a wisp of a rose-colored girdle and an old-rose felt hat with a tarnished quill.